Pretenses

Rosemary: In and Out December 29 2009


All day, I’ve been flirting with an insight –

I think I get it, then it vanishes,

Then peeks out at me again,

Although I can’t hold on, can’t grab it,

Inspect it, pin it down to see up close --

As if it were a curiously colored beetle

That had leapt into my mind.

It brings a new perspective

About earthly life within a body

Yet awareness on a plane beyond,

About who I was for years with you, my Love,

And who I’ll now become,

And how it will feel to grow up some more,

And change my boundaries of awareness yet again.

In its good time this train of thought

Will stop its game of Hide and Seek, and

Stay with me.

Till then,childlike, I play and wonder.



Rosemary Reflection -- Lives Pretending:

By my third year in France, I felt stable and grown up. I had friends – good friendships with other women, straight and gay, and chaste, deep friendships with three Catholic seminarians, as well as casual connections with other choir members and students from the university. I finally had gotten to know and be accepted in the families of several friends, and felt anchored.

These families that adopted me were remarkably diverse and fascinating – two working class, traditional couples and their grown up children – one in the rural Vosges mountains and the other in a grimy, smoky, industrial city close the German Saar region; an Alsatian Jewish family who had survived the Holocaust by “passing” openly as French; a large, extended, very wealthy and famous family connected with a champagne fortune in Reims with a village near Geneva, Switzerland, where they collectively spent the summers filling all the houses; a wealthy urban widow and her two sons in the rarefied XVIe Arrondissement in Paris;  a retired school teacher in a tiny garret apartment in a working class Parisian neighborhood. Spending weekends and school vacations with these different families allowed me to observe and understand, in depth, some of the different class and economic environments within the seemingly united country called France.

I had become exceedingly well acculturated in France. I was perceived as a native speaker of French from a different region from wherever I was. I understood customs; I got the jokes; I was employed and on my way to earning my doctorate at a French university, leading to a career as a university professor. I was sharing an apartment with a roommate. We were good friends and enjoyed living together. We felt successful with a prestigious address on the elegant 18th century gem, Place de la Carriere, at the heart of Nancy.

But as the end of that third year approached, I felt obliged to decide if I would remain in France, or whether I should go back to the US. I knew that if I continued to evolve in a French context beyond where I was, I would not repatriate. I would have no reason to do so. I would have chosen to live in a non-native culture, as a foreigner.
I liked France much better than the US, and felt as though I fit in there, but an important part of me wanted the simplicity of being what I appeared. It would almost have been easier if I had retained undeniable American characteristics instead of morphing successfully into a pseudo-Frenchwoman. I didn’t want to have to explain, for the rest of my life, that I was not a native of France. I didn’t want to feel that my life was a stage role. Based on that desire to live in truth, I chose to accept the teaching assistantship from Indiana University and finish my studies in the US.

I was 24 years old, almost 25. I was acutely aware of the traditional French belief still prevalent at that time that a woman who turned 26 without having married became officially an “Old Maid.” My old fear of spending my life as a rejected spinster had survived. Social attitudes have changed so dramatically since the early 1960s, that my fear seems now to have been intolerably quaint. Now, single life is a viable alternative , with no aura of rejection and failure, and, of course, if I had grown up in the 2000s, I would have been aware of the fourth alternative, life as a lesbian.

However, I still hadn’t discovered that reality, and I knew that graduate school would probably be my last chance to mingle with a large pool of highly educated, age-appropriate single men with the hope of finding a husband. That was definitely as important a goal, as I arrived in Bloomington, as it was to finish my doctorate. Of course, I wasn’t unique in that goal. Of our group of friends who shared the cafeteria attached to the graduate dormitories at Indiana University, virtually everyone had married someone else from the group by the end of that first year.

I met Ray, my husband-to-be, the first night at dinner. We went to a movie together after the meal. We had a good time. We decided to buy season tickets and then discovered that two people would be admitted on each single ticket. Ever frugal, we split the cost, and were thus committed to a semester of Friday night dates watching foreign movies together and necking. For two shy people, it was a great way to date!

Ray and I got engaged that Christmas, and the following summer, we were married in my parents’ parish church in Rhode Island. My extended family turned out by the dozens. No one from Ray’s family came. My sisters directed seating in the church and told people to distribute themselves evenly on both sides so that it wouldn’t be so obvious that no one from the “groom’s side” was there.

We didn’t have any problems with his family. My family, as the bride’s relatives, had set the wedding up in Rhode Island, and his family had felt that since they’d see us a week after the wedding, they didn’t have to spend the large sums it would take to travel that distance and find somewhere to stay. It made sense.

Ray was forced to switch from the MFA program in the Art school to the Art Education program in the School of Education, and he worked there on his Master’s degree, doing practice teaching in Kokomo, Indiana the second semester of our first year together. We were living on my teaching assistantship, and had found a space to rent in a suburban tract house basement. It was livable, if damp and dark. We owned a 16 inch black and white television that we had purchased with cash from wedding gifts, and a beautiful yellow budgie named “Dix-huit” who delighted us with his antics and chirps and his resolute cheerfulness. The other furnishings and linens were cast-offs from the family that owned the house.

While Ray was off practice teaching, I worked on preparing for the Ph.D. written exams and taught my French classes. I had taken the classes for a Ph.D. in French linguistics, following on the graduate work I’d done in France in psychology and in linguistics.

Ray and I were also seeking a place where we both would have academic jobs together after he had obtained his degree and I had taken the Prelims, in 1966. Teaching jobs were becoming hard to find in the mid-60s. We ended up with two possible cities: St. Louis, MO, or Magnolia, AR. We’d never heard of Magnolia, and in those pre-Internet days all we could find out about it was it was “only 100 miles from Texarkana!” We’d never heard of Texarkana, either. St. Louis sounded more promising!

I had found a job that sparked my imagination. The job was at a small sectarian college near St. Louis. However, besides the drudgery of teaching beginning language classes, the job included working on an incredible project, to “program” the French language step by step, sound by sound, sentence by sentence, meme by meme, so that it could be taught as a spoken language using tape recorded lessons rather than a written textbook. My quasi-native command of French and my by then extensive training in linguistics and the art of teaching and learning foreign languages made me a perfect match for the job. I fell in love with my boss during the interview! It was a transcendent connection. Rand and I talked for 5 hours straight, about French and linguistics, and I have no idea what else. I was flying!   Ray obtained a job teaching art at a brand new campus of a brand new community college in the St. Louis suburbs. He retired from that job in 2008, after 41 years!

Rand and I worked together on the “programmed” French course from 1966 until 1972. We completed the whole analyzing, writing, and recording process, under contract with a well-known textbook publisher. Recording a couple of hundred hours of painstakingly detailed lessons all in French cemented forever in my brain the native French accent I’d acquired in France. The work was never published because of the economic downturn of the early 70s, and the fact that foreign languages at that point lost their strategic glitter as the US turned its war engines toward Asia and away from Europe.

By that time, I, too, was teaching for the community college, which paid dramatically better than the small Protestant college, and Rand had moved on to become Dean of a college in the Southwest, although we remained very close friends. At both the community college and St. Louis Unversity, I used the course, which really did succeed in teaching people to speak and understand French at a functional level with an excellent accent within the normal four semester sequence of college –level French I and II.

In 1972, my daughter with Ray was born, and Rand came from the Southwest to see her and visit me. That was to be the last time I saw him for 25 years, although we stayed in touch.

Ray and I focused on raising our daughter together, and of course we each continued our teaching careers. Ray taught during the day and I taught evening classes, so our daughter always had one of us with her. Of course, Ray and I were like ships passing – he would be dashing in as I would be dashing out to my first class. We functioned admirably as a disconnected team, and had little chance to communicate about our respective times with the baby. Work was the core of our lives, along with our separate times parenting alone.

                                              ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

After her return from Switzerland in 1960, Ellen also went about finishing her educational goal while simultaneously seeking a partner. While in her first year as a resident at Memorial Sloan Kettering, she met a young doctor from Texas, who shared an oncology rotation with her. The young doctor, Jen, had graduated from Johns Hopkins Medical school, and had a successful career in hematology awaiting her. During their second year of residency, although Jen had gone on to another institution to complete her advanced training and prepare for Boards, she and Ellen moved in together. They shared a love of music , of travel, and of parties, and of course, they both understood the demands of a challenging medical career as a hospital attending and medical school faculty member. They both experienced weekends and nights on call, and the frequent need to rush to the hospital in emergency mode to help save a patient. They both understood crashing on the sofa after a 36 hour stint on duty at the hospital.

Ellen’s career developed at Memorial Sloan Kettering Hospital and Cornell Medical School in Manhattan, , and Jen’s at Montefiore Hospital and Albert Einstein College of Medicine in the Bronx. Ellen and Jen shared a Manhattan apartment and a house in Connecticut, which they loved, and where they spent weekends and whatever free time summers provided. The Connecticut house was the scene of many weekend parties, Guests from New York visited Ellen and Jen there most weekends – colleagues, neighbors, and social acquaintances. The house was at the top of a hill, in a forested area. In winter, their car could not get up the snowed in slope, and they kept snowshoes in the car so they could go back and forth to the house, carrying provisions and supplies.

Ellen and Jen totally remodeled the house, doubling its size. They did much of the work themselves. Together they hewed trees and cut the cedar shakes from which they would make the roof. Ellen was extremely proud of being able to do this with her one hand. Of course, it was one of the activities in which she overused that arm, wearing out the shoulder, leading to great pain and further disability in her seventies. She often commented in late life on how important it was for young people to realize that they could wear out their bodies through overachievement in physical activities.

She was especially aware of the importance of that awareness for people with physical disabilities, who were tempted to overuse other body parts in compensation. She chronicled for me the joint replacement surgeries suffered by her disabled friends who used crutches or wheelchairs, and emphasized how much better it was to use electric technologies than to wear out their shoulders, hips, or knees trying to be totally self-sufficient and not appear disabled. It was a desperate price to pay for the appearance of “being just like everyone else.”

Ellen and Jen finally sold the house in Connecticut and moved out of the rented apartment in Manhattan, buying a house in New Rochelle, which was close to Jen’s place of work. The apartment had been close to Ellen’s job at Sloan Kettering, but necessitated a commute for Jen.

Now it was Ellen who would commute, on the train. This represented a severe hardship. Ellen had taken driving lessons so that she would be able to drive a car, a necessity for suburban mobility. However, Jen, who had owned the car, was so critical of Ellen’s ability to steer safely with one hand -- screaming that Ellen was “going to kill somebody!” -- that Ellen was terrified to take the wheel, although she had passed the driver’s test with flying colors. Her license, which she renewed and maintained to the end of her life without ever driving once on her own, had a restriction, that because of her one-handedness, she was required to use a ball that clipped to the steering wheel, as a sort of handle. This had long since proven to be useless, and the balls were no longer manufactured; they became impossible to find. I had never seen one, although Ellen had told me about learning to drive using it.   I didn’t realize that Ellen had hung on to the one she had acquired when getting her driver’s license. When going through Ellen’s things after her death, I came across a strange round object attached to a clip, and for a long time could not figure out what it was. Finally it dawned on me – it was the steering wheel knob! Ellen had hoped almost until her death that she would at some point be able to get behind the wheel of a car and drive herself somewhere.  It never happened, although I had encouraged her to do it, or to take refresher lessons while we were living in Berkeley. That knob was a poignant symbol of a hope that never materialized. 

Ellen’s inability to get around in the suburban community highlighted a further humiliation that had been less disturbing while Ellen and Jen had lived in Manhattan, where Ellen could walk or take the bus or subway wherever she needed to go. Neither Ellen nor Jen had ever told their birth families – parents or siblings – that they were gay and were partners. They said they were “roommates,” fearing their families’ scorn if they were found out as lovers and partners. Their apartment and the house alike had two bedrooms with beds, one furnished as Jen’s and the other as Ellen’s. The friend who had stayed with them during that time had always been put up in “Jen’s room,” of course realizing that Jen never occupied that room but slept with Ellen. The friend told me “They called that room “Jen’s room” for their families, for when relatives came to visit.” At Christmas, Jen would go home to her family, but didn’t take Ellen with her, because Ellen was “only a roommate.” Ellen ended up spending Christmases in New Rochelle alone, imprisoned in the house, unable to get to the store or to any other destination on her own, because of her inability to drive. She felt desolate, isolated, and abandoned.

In New Rochelle, Ellen relied on asking neighbors to take her in their cars to the commuter station and then home in the evening, a necessity which she also found humiliating . However, it turned out that the commutes on the train provided an important opportunity for Ellen. She used the time to start writing a journal. After a few months, upon rereading some of what she had written, she realized that if she tweaked a word here or there, her writing would be classified as poetic. From then on, she wrote poetry, rather than creating a journal in prose. The solitary time on the train provided an opportunity for introspection that her busy life as a doctor, house remodeler, and social maven had not allowed. It was a major turning point in her self-awareness.



Ellen October 1984, on the train:






A Romantic


I never knew that I was such a romantic.

No one ever told me that

Others did not feel as I.

That they did not get lost in Brandenberg Concerti.

That the first sniff of a cork

Did not bring tears to their eyes.

That their passions did not take over their lives.

That they did not long to wander amidst the relics

Of feelings supposedly dead in 1918.



How could I know?



Romantics do not wear Brooks Brothers women's blazers,

Commute on Conrail and read "The New York Times"

With special attention to food, houses and "Hers".

They do not carry briefcases or stethoscopes,

Or wear long white coats as they practice their professions.

Nor do they understand the complexities of illness

And the arcane scientific symbols thereof.

They feel, and let their lives run on intuition,

On intensity, on outrageous sentiment.



As I have all the while,

Pretending.